Before he established Golden Gryphon Press, the late James Turner
edited a superb line of SF collections for the long-established Arkham
House; Voyages by Starlight was one of the last of these to appear,
not long before Cthulhu came stomping up from the foundations and switched
the lights off again (that is, not long before the Lovecraft-besotted
owners of Arkham House decided SF no longer belonged in their mouldering
mansion.) But however the politics of publishing beset Turner, his taste
and editorial skill suffered no lapses: Voyages by Starlight
assembles many of the best stories by one of Britain's best SF and Fantasy
writers. Individually, these pieces are impressive enough; but read
cumulatively, as Turner's good work has made possible, they constitute
a cogent tapestry of meaning, quietly written, psychologically acute,
and as atmospheric as SF has ever been.

MacLeod is (perhaps) a British Ray Bradbury. He resembles Bradbury
in his consistent preference for the short form, in his poeticism, in
his achievement of graceful hybrids of genre, in his profound understanding
of the awkward transitions of childhood and the frustrations of bourgeois
adulthood; but he is simultaneously sharper than Bradbury, capable of
more sustained literary meditation, less sentimental, a good deal more
subtle. In MacLeod's hands, the lyrical intimacy of domestic Horror
familiar from Bradbury, while deployed with a certain humane obliqueness,
is devastating in unusual measure. Midcentury families encouraged their
sons to build model warplanes; in "1/72nd Scale" this encouragement
is dramatised as a terrible pressure, and the model of a bomber, constructed
in desperation and futility, delivers an unthinkable load. More emphatically
still, "Grownups" tells of a world very like our own, but with a sinister
elaboration superadded to the reproductive routines of the human species:
as children mature into adulthood, they face painful metamorphosis,
a symbolically very penetrating intensification of the common experience
of adolescence. Drawing upon MacLeod's particular command of the ambience
of the Second World War, "Tirkiluk" turns a strange Arctic menage into
an embodiment of all the betrayal and self-sacrifice family life might
ever entail. Perhaps there was insufficient Horror here to satisfy the
proprietors of Arkham House; but if so, they failed to appreciate it
in a transcendently skillful form.

MacLeod's Fantasy is surreal in detail, and merciless in implication.
The quasi-mediaeval secondary worlds of "Green" and "The Giving Mouth"
are in fact densely wrought expressions of the paradoxes implicit in
all losses, all gains: in the first story, escape from the Gardens of
youth and servitude entails the relinquishment of all beauty and all
illusion, and in the second, to turn Hell into Heaven is to find no
final contentment. The modernity of these tales strikingly belies their
feudal trappings: "Green" seems at times like Great Expectations
in Fairyland, and "The Giving Mouth" like a premonition of the magickal
industrialism of The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993) by Michael
Swanwick (who, probably not coincidentally, introduces Voyages by
Starlight). A similar ambiguity of effect can be found in "Ellen
O'Hara"; the eponymous IRA member lives amidst, and is party to, the
brutalities of contemporary urban terrorism, but finds the antidote
(simple, obvious) to mundane sectarianism in talents of a supernatural
kind...

And there is MacLeod's SF. The future will be decadent: how can conscience
and integrity survive this? MacLeod provides a variety of answers, none
entirely comforting; but the four SF pieces here share a sense that
it is nostalgia for the bright natural past that will be most corrupting
in the utopias and dystopias to come. False seaside resorts--affectations
and negations in decaying worlds--are the focus of "Starship Day"
[available
to read elsewhere in infinity
plus] and "The Perfect Stranger", permitting telling
explorations of the mentality of escapism. "Marnie" is an account by
an obsessive lover of his flight from an unsatisfactory Twenty First
Century back to the Twentieth Century that first confounded him; MacLeod
captures perfectly here just how infantile a misdirected personality
can become, just how vicious a circle can be. "Papa", a more optimistic
description of the utopia that might just somehow be achieved in spite
of the foregoing instances of gloom, yet requires a difficult and imperfect
accommodation by its protagonist to a future that has all but forgotten
him. A voyage best unremembered, a child sold, a love lost twice over,
a desperate bid to retain contact with the receding wavefront of the
present: these are MacLeod's mementos of tomorrow, delivered cogently,
thoughtfully, with profound humane urgency.

Voyages by Starlight is a fine book, humanist SF of a very high
order. A second Ian R MacLeod collection is surely overdue--think of
"Snodgrass" [available
to read elsewhere in infinity
plus], "The Summer Isles", "The Chop Girl", and many
others uncollected. In consideration of his services to it, the future
owes MacLeod (and us) that much at least.